SHIGERU MIYAGAWA: MIT recently did a study of future of MIT education. And right at the top, what we have to do is to teach teamwork and leadership above technical skills. And the neat thing about getting students to work with visual materials, is that because there's so much information, that you've got to work in teams. Just having one perspective is interesting, but having two perspectives is really interesting. And having multiple perspectives on the same material is just extraordinary, and people debate.
This is something else, the idea of critical thinking. You really debate based on whatever evidence you can find in the image, and historical and cultural knowledge that you gain from your readings and the video. And so the idea of teamwork really comes into play. And you can see people playing leadership roles. And people sort of switch leaders and leadership as they go from one image to the next, depending on what they feel comfortable talking about.
Here's some things to keep in mind about incorporating visual materials. The first thing that one should know, we know this already, is that young people are exposed to visual materials by the ton on a daily basis. And yet, they are never taught how to interpret them. What happens with visual materials, is that you go in, you react emotionally, and then you come out. Without carefully analyzing the content.
Unlike written material. Written material, you have to go through word by word and think about what is this? What does this say? And so it's critical that we teach how to read visuals. That's one point.
The second point is that there's a ton of visuals out there. You have to curate them. You can't just throw students into this collection of visuals without some sense of knowing where those visuals come from. If you want students to publish the visuals, then you have to think about copyright.
And students should be taught about copyright. What things you can and cannot do. So these are all 21st century skills that you can teach with visual material.
